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Turning off the TV

So it’s been over a year since I’ve visited America, so I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but here in Korea, I see little tiny children playing with iPhones. And I mean basically babies playing with iPhones. Now I don’t want to judge anyone’s parenting choices but it scares me. When we go out to eat, inevitably, there are always multiple families that have all the kids hooked up to the smart phones watching cartoons. Besides being bad for their development, it can’t be good for their eyes to stare at a little tiny screen like that, and it’s bad manners to have a phone at the table in my opinion. Maybe I’m a dinosaur. Am I old-fashioned? Well, I probably did spend an unhealthy amount of time playing Super Mario or hooked up to the Commodore 64 myself, and I guess I turned out fine. Nowadays, in Korea like 99% of elementary school kids have smart phones. Weird. My husband says it’s because if one parent buys it for their kids then all the other parents have to buy it too or else they will be deemed “poor” or “bad parents.” Now, I could be wrong, but I told him that I bet those rich, education-crazed parents in Gangnam, would not dream of letting their kids play with smart phones, so I have no intention of doing that myself. Of course I had no intention of using pacifiers, but look what happened there.

Out of fear that I might be creating one of those techno-addicted kids, I need to get serious about what I do around the baby now that she’s becoming more aware of what’s going on around her, so the day she turned six months, I decided to turn off the tube. The first day was killer. I listened to the radio because I can’t stand silence. But I did get a lot more done than I usually do. By the end of the day though, I was watching Breaking Dawn on TV. What went wrong? And today I had to turn on CNN to catch up with the news. I guess there are always podcasts or NPR. Maybe I should hide the remote from myself. I wonder what other moms do. Anyone else out there with a bad TV addiction?